Why I’m glad I did my Masters Of Divinity (Even Though It Didn’t Make Sense)

Over the last 4 years of doing my master of divinity, there are miracles I witnessed in my own life that I will never forget. They have forever changed what I believe is possible when God is in your corner.

For the next little while, I will be writing and publishing some posts about my time spent in school, as I take some time to integrate my master’s program in my being. I just completed a Master of Divinity at Tyndale University in Toronto and will have my convocation in May.

While I was studying for the past four years, I didn’t get to share much of the journey, as I was too busy writing academic papers and completing some 120+ assignments. But now that it is complete, I will be taking a few weeks to write about it, to integrate and digest all just happened to me!

Here’s a review of all the goodness that has come out of my degree, all things I could never have predicted!

1.    A podcast would come of it.

The grandest and awe-inspiring of the miracles is that I got to make a podcast about my journey, Heavenly Minded Earthly Good. I remember the moment I got an email from Dr. James Tyler Robertson, my history professor, asking to talk on Zoom. I remember the moment he offered me the job, before ever seeing my resume.

A few months later, I remember the moment he asked me if I wanted to tell my story on the podcast.

Those are just a few of the threads that shimmer in my mind, but that whole project is something is a project direct from heaven. It’s the kind of project that could never have happened without a divine hand.

That podcast is 11 episodes of storytelling weaved in with interviews with experts. I remember starting many of those episodes, alone at home and feeling a gnawing anxiety about how to do this? I just had to try.

I had to press record.

I had to jot a few notes on a Google doc and hope for the best.

I have never produced content that was 30+ minutes long. This wasn’t a 30-minute interview.

This podcast weaves personal narrative and expert interviews together so that there is something new that happens every 1-5 minutes. This means each episode contains at least 7 scenes, and at least 10 music tracks. I had never made anything like that.

Listen to the podcast on your favourite platform.

When I started producing this podcast in 2022, I hadn’t produced any substantial content in a few years. I didn’t know if I could pull this off, but apparently, my boss thought I could! So out of necessity, I tried.

I remember these mornings feeling so anxious because the podcast is honest, personal and transparent. I had to enter a particular psychological, spiritual and emotional space to open up and talk about certain things on the podcast. At a certain point I resorted to making parts of the podcast at 5am in the morning because it’s the only time I can enter that emotional space consistently and not procrastinate.

Despite the loneliness and anxiety, I persevered because I also had the sense that I was made for this.

I knew that being vulnerable and open actually helped me connect with people. I might have to write another blog or two about this whole topic or else I will monopolize this blog lol, but yes, if the only good thing that came out of my Mdiv was the opportunity to do this podcast, it would have been worth it.

A Creative Awakening

That podcast also showed me that “I still got it,” or, better said, “God could give me back the abilities I used to have, and so much more.” I saw that I still had innate storytelling abilities, something I could just do naturally without trying. After years doing things like graphic design and social media management at a job at the church, the podcast was a totally different kind of media work. But I did it!

Even with how miraculous the podcast is, it’s just one of many lasting blessings that my Mdiv has given me.

2.    Healing would come of it.  

As a part of my program, I had to work with a therapist for 6 sessions right at the beginning. That turned into almost 4 years of working with my therapist. I just had my last session with her this week because it’s time to close the books, for now.

I never would have gone for therapy on my own. I had the idea that it was for people with real problems and I could manage fine. It felt weak to seek out therapy, and I wouldn’t have done it. Also, therapy is expensive and even company insurance typically only covers 5 sessions.

I had no idea just how much therapy would help me! In fact, for the first year or two, I wasn’t even sure how it was helping me. I didn’t particularly have any big revelations in most sessions. I just knew that I felt better after a session.

Looking back now, (and having taken a few counselling courses myself) I realize that the safe space I had with my counsellor to talk about anything was deeply restorative.

It gave me the sense that I was ok. That I could make it through the next week or two. In those spaces, I was allowed to be proud that I had made it through whatever challenges happened. I felt assured that I had the strength to deal with whatever lay ahead in the coming week or two before my next session. That seems like a minute difference, but multiply that over four years, and suddenly that pocket of feeling safe and okay became the groundwork on which I could rebuild my life.

How Therapy Helped Me

My experience with therapy has taken away all the judgments I had about therapy and it’s shown me how it can help people. Therapy has also shown me how much we need good friends, how much we need a listening ear, and how much support we all need.

I worked with my therapist/counsellor all through the pandemic. It just worked out that way because I started my program in August 2019, and when my school started to open up therapy for all students due to the pandemic, I already had someone.

I remember certain weeks of the pandemic when the collective anxiety, anger and fear were overwhelming, when I felt very alone after months of working from home. It was a comfort knowing that every week, I either had my counsellor to talk to or my spiritual director. (I saw both every other week so that every week I had someone to talk to.)

Who knows where I would have ended up psychologically without that support?

Looking back, if I had been led to do my Mdiv just for the healing and learning that would come from working with a therapist or spiritual director, that might have been worth it.

3.    Patience would come of it.

My masters program forced me to grow in patience.  It showed me how much I can change when I persevere and I wait and trust. I can now “trust in the process” much more. Most masters can be done in 2-3 years. Some can even be done in 1 year. Mine was designed to take up 4 years, and some of my classmates will take even longer.

When I signed up to do this particular program back in 2019, I did it partly because I had the intuition that I wouldn’t be leaving Toronto anytime soon, so what the heck, there wouldn’t be much difference between a 3 year program and 4 year program.

I had the gut sense that this was the program for me and I didn’t even look around much to compare programs. Four years felt like a lifetime, but at that point in my life, I sometimes wasn’t even happy to be alive, so the program would give me a sense of direction and motion. I guess I will be alive four years from now.

The program would chunk up the next 4 years into 4-month semesters and it would give me classmates to journey with for 3 of those 4 years.

I was so discouraged about my life at that point, that signing up for a four years master’s gave me a bit of hope, that I would make it through the next 4 years stronger and maybe better than I was in 2019.

I knew from my undergrads, which took 5 years, that who I was in year 1 was light years at graduation at year 5, so maybe something amazing and unforeseeable would happen here too.

When the pandemic hit in 2020 and school went online, and I had an anchor of community, therapy and learning, something most of the working people around me didn’t have and I was grateful.

It was very hard to work and do school for a while, but eventually, I got the hang of it. Instead of fighting the fact that I had to do school, I eventually made the decision to give it my all and do my best, and from that point on, things got easier. (Listen to Ep 7 - For the Love of Idols - for more on this chapter of my life.)

Looking back now, 40 months, 1 pandemic, 3 lockdowns, 80+ papers later, yes, I am definitely a more patient person. I trust that wherever I’m going to be in four years will exceed my imagination. I have a deep hope that my life will have even more meaning and depth than it has today.

If this is what could happen in my life, all the healing, the growth, just because I relented to a 4-year masters program, then yes, I am more than willing to take chances and do something daring and ridiculous to see what the next 4 years will bring.

(But I will not be cutting my heart up to chin-length just to watch time pass, haha! I intend on living on the next 4 years with long, luscious hair. :) - I cut over 14 inches of my hair twice over the last 4 years, from waist length down to chin length because I felt like life was so boring, I needed a marker to watch time pass. So I figured if I cut my hair when I turned 30, it would return to waist length by the time I graduated in spring 2023, and that’s exactly what has happened! :)

4.    New capabilities and skills would come of it.

My masters pushed me to discover abilities I didn’t know I had. It pushed me to do things that were uncomfortable and seemed a bit useless, and it showed me that something good could come out of those experiences.

There is an inner resilience and fortitude that I feel was forged in my soul from completing something this spiritually, emotionally and mentally arduous. The closest feeling to this is when I backpacked through Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya alone when I was 21. After that, I felt like I could do anything. I had done the scariest thing I could imagine and I had survived. On that backpacking trip, I found a source of courage that I still carry with me today.

I realized quickly in my Mdiv that I would have to write academic papers. I hadn’t thought much about that part when I first applied. But when I started getting assignment after assignment to write essays, I was sad inside. I had just started to do some personal writing and blogging in 2018, and I loved writing in the mornings… I

At some point in late 2019, and definitely in 2020, I had to stop my personal writing altogether. It’s why if you look at my blog history, you can see a ton of blogs in 2018-2019, and just a few in 2020 to the present.

Creative writing was like therapy for me, but at some point, I realized that no matter how hard I pushed myself, I did not have the emotional and mental capacity to do personal creative writing and academic paper writing. Academic papers had to win.

I remember that feeling, this moment when I realized that I would have to start working on my master’s papers at 5 am in the morning, instead of writing blogs and personal thoughts.

It really felt like a part of me died. I had to take this part of my heart that big and vast and wanted to connect with you all through words, videos and the internet, and I had to hibernate it.

I had to tell myself, the day to write again will come. It will come. It is not right now, but it will come again.

Clearly, God is telling me now is not the time. Because I had a season of writing 2018, I knew that a writing portal could open up in my schedule, but right now that portal was closing. So I sadly and voluntarily stopped writing blogs and tracking my journey, even though both of those things were extremely therapeutic.

From that point on, somewhere in early 2020, I let go of my creative writing.

But in that trade-off, I did figure out that ok - I CAN still write academic papers and I guess I’m decent at it! And sometimes, sometimes! (lol) I would have fun! I holed myself up in the small public library in my town for way too many Saturdays and camped there until my brain was mush but there were 10 pages of an essay.

I sat beside the high school students and old folks in the library. I liked that I looked young, so I blended in with the students haha. And I just came to accept that this was the season of my life.

I sacrificed a lot of get-togethers with friends to do this master’s.

As much as I disliked writing academic papers, most of the time, I would get still something from each paper I wrote. I would get these little glimmers of hope like God was speaking directly to me about what I was writing about. Usually, I’d have to keep an Evernote note open in the background so that when a thought hit me, I had somewhere to write it down. I swap applications for a few minutes, jot down my ‘message from God’ and then go back to my papers.

Anyway, I made it through ALL those papers and presentations and books. By my estimate, I must have completed 120+ assignments over the last 3.5 years.

Though the challenges that I face in my work are different from what I did for my Mdiv, I feel an inner strength that is palpable to me.  I know I can do it. If I could backpack East Africa solo, and if I could do this master’s while working two jobs, then I can do anything, through Christ who lives in me. When I put myself through something difficult, I gain new gifts, skills and abilities.

And that makes it all worth it.

Infinite Love,

Anita